


more wretched than divine

by carol_danvers



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes-centric, Established Relationship, Ghost Steve Rogers, Ghosts, Heavy Angst, M/M, Mental Instability, Not Canon Compliant, Peggy Carter as Captain America, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Dies, Supernatural Elements, Torture, or he's just crazy it's up for debate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 20:12:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19184764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carol_danvers/pseuds/carol_danvers
Summary: Steve Rogers is dead, but Bucky can't seem to let him go. Whether as a prisoner of Hydra or at the front of World War II or as the Winter Soldier, Steve is still haunting him.





	more wretched than divine

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to kaya for this idea! they prompted this as a follow-up to my other work, "had you thinking you'd never be alone," and it didn't quite work out in the same verse, but i used the idea for this fun thing anyways. apologies in advance for the extreme misuse of parentheses.

Bucky was holding his hand when Steve died. 

His breaths had been shallow and aching for days. They had rattled in his chest and shaken his ribs like birds in cages do. Bucky had spent weeks coaxing him through his breaths, wiping the blood off of his chin when he coughed up his lungs. He had given Steve all the medicine that they could afford, and he had worked himself deeper than bone to get enough food for him. 

No one could say that he didn’t try. It just wasn’t enough. 

He died, and Bucky watched, and their last kiss together was with blood on Steve’s lips and cancer soaking through his lungs. 

It didn’t get easier. 

It was supposed to. Rebecca, his sister, had said it over and over again, that it would get easier as time passed. Time heals all wounds, she had said. It took time, but Bucky would be able to breathe again. One day. 

He was still holding out for that day. Hours, days, weeks, months later, he was still holding out for the day that it didn’t hurt so much. The pain hadn’t faded at all, even though Steve had died when they were twenty two and Bucky was now older than Steve ever would be.

Bucky kept going, Rebecca promising that it would get better. He cried until the only tears left in the world were the ones in the sea. He hated God until the only emotion left in him was an aching bitterness and a refusal to go into a church. He fought everything that moved out of a loyalty left to a ghost until even that energy had faded from his fists. He cried again and again and again, and none of it brought Steve back from the dead. 

Bucky went to war without an inch of hope left in the miles of veins curled up under his skin. He went through boot camp, the running and the fighting coming easy to him after so many years of boxing. He learned to pull the trigger of a gun on the enemy, and didn’t bother to learn the enemy’s name. 

He was fighting for justice, he knew. It’s what Steve would have wanted-- to fight in this war, as godforsaken as violence was, to avenge those who couldn’t fight. Bucky climbed the ranks until medals were clipped onto his uniform and “Sergeant” had replaced his first name. He didn’t mind. He liked being a leader, having a reason to keep fighting. Steve would have been proud of him, and that was what mattered. 

It was a routine operation, the battle at Azzano. They were supposed to go and blow the Nazis to hell and try not to swallow the dirt that exploded in their faces. They had foxholes and numbers in the thousands and guns (the general had promised they were at the forefront of technology, had promised that no man had better). 

Bucky stood in front of his men, arm in front of Sammy, a new recruit, as if that would protect him (protecting had always come easy to him, like his bones had never unlearned the reflex after Steve died). Sammy’s breathing was heavy, inhales and exhales like trains on broken tracks. He was so young, and his body had been built for violin playing, not violence. Bucky had heard him crying into his bed roll at night more than once, and every Steve-related instinct reached out for him. 

“What the hell?” Bucky whispered. His hand found Sammy’s chest, pushing him back. “Get back!” 

There were lights in the Nazi’s weapons, something straight out of a goddamn science fiction novel. If he made it out of this, Bucky swore he would never read H.G. Wells again. People were falling, vanishing into thin air, like they had never been there at all. 

“Fucking fuck,” Sammy muttered behind him. He clutched at Bucky’s arm (he was only eighteen), pulling him back. “Sergeant, we gotta -- ”

Bucky turned, pushing him back. “Find cover,” he hissed. 

He didn’t care if cowardice was shameful. There was one of those sciencey moving pictures out there, and people were dying without screaming. Everyone before them had gone down screaming in the face of a rifle, had gone down with curses and fear on their lips as they tried to swallow down their last breath. But there were blue lights and tanks rolling down the hills, like lightning in the dark fields, burning up Allied forces like they were twigs, and no one was screaming. 

“What the hell?” Bucky whispered again, eyes caught on the guns. He could see the eyes of a Nazi, glimmering in the shadows. 

In front of him, the captain was getting on his knees. 

Bucky did the same. 

The Hydra prison camp could be worse. (Steve could be there, in pain.) 

They worked, hauling metal and dead bodies to the furnaces, trying to meet the quota in their limited hours. It was grueling work, the kind that ached at your shoulder blades and carved out every bit of fight left in your bones. Bucky’s wrists ached from lifting, and muscles he didn’t know he had were burning. 

The heat was constantly plastered against his skin, mixing with the sweat of the other men in the prison with him. It was all coming to a head in the humidity and the fires of the furnaces. He hadn’t seen the sun in eons. 

Sammy stuck close to Bucky’s side. He didn’t ever meet his quotas, and his back was scarred from the whip. The foreman hated him, but hated Bucky more when Bucky pulled the extra weight that Sammy couldn’t carry. Sammy had tear tracks that were burnt into his cheeks from landing there so often. They sizzled on his skin, condensing and evaporating into the heat. There was no room for sorrow in Hydra’s prisons, there was only the work and the whip and the dying. 

They took people away, sometimes. They chose the biggest men, or the weakest. They chose the loudest, or the men who didn’t talk at all. They chose people who complained, or they chose people who had been picture perfect prisoners. They didn’t seem to have a system as far as Bucky could tell (he just knew that one day, he would be carried off too). 

Bucky had lost track of time when they came again. It was one of the guards, and the doctor. Zola, Bucky thought his name was. His face was bubbling with excitement as he pointed out the different men he wanted. Bucky didn’t know what they were used for, he just knew that they never came back. 

The foreman laughed at something Zola said, and pointed towards the cage Bucky and Sammy were in. Bucky glared back at them, like maybe the wolf in his eyes would set them free. He found Sammy’s arm, pulling the boy behind himself. Zola smiled. It was the only cold thing in this hellscape. 

The foreman made his way over to them, the keys rattling in his hand. Bucky curled his fist up, the grime and sweat thick in the lines of his palms. 

“Whitman,” the foreman growled. “Get over here.” 

Behind him, Sammy flinched, and Bucky felt a shiver run down his spine. Bucky knew without looking how the fear would be carved into the thin lines at Sammy’s eyes, how the fear would be catalogued between his shaking lips.

Bucky stepped forward. “No.” 

The foreman stared. “What?” 

“I said no.” Bucky pushed Sammy farther behind him, and Sammy didn’t protest. “He’s not going with you.” 

“You don’t get a choice, boy,” the foreman growled again. There was a gun in a holster at his waist. Bucky didn’t care. 

“Take me instead,” Bucky said. “You can’t have him.” 

Above the moaning of the furnace and the constant rumble of the conveyor belts, Zola was laughing. It sounded like metal grinding against concrete, a kind of scratch that Bucky wouldn’t ever be able to forget. 

“I want this one,” Zola told the foreman. 

Bucky nodded, fists uncurling. “You can have me. Just don’t touch him.” 

The foreman grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the cage, fingers digging purple into Bucky’s skin. He muttered something in German that Bucky didn’t care to translate, and dragged him away. 

Zola walked with them, his shoes clicking against the factory floor. Every step added a shot of cold fear into Bucky’s veins, but it was worth it. He didn’t have any regrets. Whatever they did to him, it would spare Sammy, and that was what mattered. 

“It’s admirable,” Zola said, his accent thick as the foreman shoved Bucky onto a table. He began to lock Bucky in, pulling the straps tight enough that they reached his bones. “Your bravery.” 

“You wouldn’t know anything about bravery,” Bucky spat. The foreman punched him, and Bucky bit back a scream. He wouldn’t scream. He wouldn’t show that kind of pain. Not to these men. 

Zola shook his head. “You forget that I am fighting a war too. I know bravery when I see it, and I commend you for what you did for that boy.” 

He was putting together needles and serums and Bucky swallowed anxiously. Zola kept talking. “It is a shame that your bravery will save no one. Not the boy, not the Jews, not you.” 

“Fuck you,” was all Bucky could say. The foreman pulled the last strap tight against his ankle, and Bucky flinched. The foreman was grinning, teeth yellow and deeply set in his pale mouth. It was like watching a skeleton, one who was getting ready to execute you. 

“Now, let’s place nice,” Zola murmured. He turned towards Bucky. His white lab coat was the only clean thing in the room. Bucky didn’t scream. He refused. 

He passed out, he was pretty sure, but he couldn’t tell-- Zola had injected him with something. It had hurt (God, it had hurt, it had hurt like nothing else, it had been fire and brandy and knives and sandpaper). He stared Zola down. Zola laughed. Zola injected him with something and Bucky hadn’t screamed (it had hurt, something like plum wine and skinned knees and paper cuts) and the tears had tasted like salt and vinegar. 

When he woke up, the room was empty. 

When he woke up, Zola was there and so were his needles. He stabbed and pressed and wrote things down and Bucky didn’t blink, he would not cry uncle and he would not surrender. If he died, they would take someone he wanted to save (Steve? Sammy? Seth? Sean?). There was something important and Bucky wasn’t going to give in. Zola carved something into his arm, a pattern of holes and cuts and burns. Bucky squeezed his eyes shut as if that would make all of this a dream. 

When he woke up, the room was empty. Bucky finally screamed. 

When he woke up, Zola was there, and he was smiling. 

“Everything is holding steady,” Zola was saying. “The serum is not killing him.” 

_Oh,_ Bucky thought. _Not killing him is good. That’s good._

“With a little bit of time,” Zola was saying, “we could have our very own Soldier. A victory for Germany, I believe. The Fuhrer will be pleased.” 

_Oh,_ Bucky thought. _That was not good._

Zola was laughing. It cut Bucky deeper than his knives had. He scribbled things onto his clipboard, but Bucky had forgotten what letters looked like. He had forgotten numbers he had forgotten language he had forgotten hope and bravery and what was the point of it all what was he doing why wouldn’t he just die? 

_Sergeant Barnes. 32557241. Sergeant Barnes. 32557241. Sergeant Barnes. 32557241. Sergeant Barnes. 32557241._

When he woke up, the room was empty. The knives and tools glittered on a stand next to the table Bucky was strapped down on. Every piece of him was cold and numb. He couldn’t feel his fingers. A meager stream of sunlight was fighting its way through a stained window, crossing through the bars and landing on the ground, spotlighting a patch of mold growing there. It was almost beautiful.

There was no one around, and there was fire in his veins. The sunlight was achingly beautiful and Bucky wanted to touch it. He strained against the straps, cutting new scars into his arms as he leaned forward. Zola was gone, but there were holes in his forearms and scars at his wrists and cigarette burns on his stomach. He wanted to touch the sunlight. The straps dug in and he screamed. 

When he woke up, Steve was there. 

“Hey pal,” Steve said quietly. “You okay there?” 

Bucky just laughed. All that praying, and Steve came back to him now, in the last place Bucky wanted to see him. All that praying, and Steve came back to him when Bucky had lost his mind. Or maybe it’s just that now he was dead now too. 

“Bucky,” Steve said, and his voice was like satin. “I’m here, love. It’s gonna be okay.” 

Bucky laughed again. The restraints didn’t hurt so much now that he was dead.

When he woke up, Zola had a knife at his wrist. He was pressing in slowly, the clean edge biting in and splitting the skin without effort. Bucky squeezed his eyes shut, all his muscles tense. He must not be dead, then. In heaven, Zola would be gone. 

He swallowed down another scream as Zola bit further into his veins with the knife. Maybe he was in hell. Maybe he deserved it. God knew he was a sinner, after all. God knew what he deserved. 

Zola stabbed through his wrist and Bucky screamed, a guttural yell of pain and agony and hopelessness and torture. There were pins and needles and knives jutting through his wrists and Zola thought it would heal itself. Bucky didn’t care (he just wanted it all to be over). 

His veins weren’t burning anymore, but his skin felt torn apart and stitched back together. His arm had been dislocated from straining against the straps so hard. No one bothered to fix it. 

He screamed until he felt someone hold his hand. He screamed until God took pity on him and gave him Steve again. 

“Bucky,” Steve whispered. His voice was so soft, and Bucky sunk into it. He looked to his side, and Steve was there, smiling softly at him. He pressed a soft kiss to the back of Bucky’s hand, his head bowed as he squeezed his fingers gently. 

“Hi, doll,” Bucky murmured. His voice was hoarse from misuse. “Are you really here?” 

Steve looked back up to Bucky, but didn’t release his hand. “Depends who you ask,” he said. “How’re you holding up?” 

“I miss you,” was all Bucky could choke out. “I miss you and I’m hurting and hell lasts for all eternity.” 

“This isn’t hell,” Steve told him. He leaned forward, a hand brushing over Bucky’s chest. His skin was so pale. “I promise you’re gonna get out of here.” 

Bucky almost cracked a smile. “If this isn’t hell, I don’t want to imagine what it’s gonna be like when I actually die.” 

“You won’t go to hell,” Steve said, as if he knew such things. 

“You and I both know I will.” Bucky closed his eyes. His eyelids were so heavy and Steve was such a safe presence. “If I were less of a sinner, I would’ve been able to let you go.” 

“You’re gonna be okay,” was all that Steve said. “I love you, you know that?” 

“Of course I know,” Bucky told him. He smiled as he felt Steve press a small kiss to his cheek. There were so little kind things left in this world, he thought. Steve was one of them. 

“Then promise me you’ll hang on a bit longer,” Steve said. “I’ll be here for you, love.” 

“Okay,” Bucky said. 

When he woke up, he was alone and the sunlight was gone and the cuts had healed. There was the ghost of a kiss on his cheek. 

He didn’t know how much time passed until Captain America came. He didn’t measure in hours or days anymore, he measured in pills and injections. He measured in cuts and bruises. In how many times Zola hit him or measured him or weighed him or burnt him. 

When Captain America came, all he could hear was screaming. There was sweat sticking to his skin like cling wrap, and his clothes didn’t fit his skeletal form anymore, and there were cramps in his shoulder blades that felt more like brands (Zola was carved into his skin with an alphabet Bucky didn’t have memorized). 

She frowned when she saw him, dirt sticking to her cheek and a gun in her hands. “Who are you?” 

“Sergeant Barnes. 32557241.”

“I’m here to take you home,” she said, a frown still itching at her lips. “Can you walk?” 

“I’m strapped down,” he said. The words clawed at his lips. He hadn’t spoken in so long. His tongue only knew how to scream. His lips only knew how to break. 

“Fair enough,” she said, pulling a knife out of a belt. She was wearing some stupid combination of stars and stripes and red and blue, but Bucky hadn’t seen color in so long that he didn’t care. If she wanted to wear the American flag while storming a Nazi base, that was her perogative. She cut him loose, the tight straps snapping free. 

He stared at her, testing out his fingers. It almost hurt to move them, but -- not quite. 

“Can you walk?” she asked again, impatiently. 

He nodded slowly. “Thank you.” 

“Okay, come on, we have to get out of here.” She waited for him to climb clumsily off the table, pulling at his arm as he walked. He stumbled over every other step, but she didn’t stop, just kept pulling him along. 

“Who are you?” he asked, rubbing at his arm. His legs were still strong and he could walk but everything tingled and ached and he wanted a soft bed more than anything. 

“Captain America,” she said. 

“You’re a Brit,” he said. 

“And the scientist who made me was German. What’s your point?” 

“It doesn’t make sense.” 

She sighed, turning back to him. He halted, finally meeting her eyes. He didn’t know what he expected, but there was a hardness there that only came with years of fighting. “We don’t have time to argue about this, Sergeant. Are you following me or not?” 

He licked his lips, glaring at her. “Following,” he said, jaw stiff. “Captain.” 

“Good,” she said pointedly. “Come on.” 

He followed her out of the base, sticking close to her side as they fought their way out of the base. They made a good team, once Bucky had picked a gun off a fallen Nazi, and she had decided to trust him just a little bit. They moved in unison, her taking point while Bucky covered her.

The two found the rest of the escaped prisoners easily, the big group amassing at the beginning of the long walk back to came. She called them all to order, and they listened to her. She had a kind of heroic voice, something strong lying just beneath the surface of her words-- every sentence was a command and every pause was a threat. The men fell in line easily, Bucky among them. 

They made their way back to camp, Bucky marching breathlessly. With every step, his feet grew more accustomed to the ground, to the walking. There were rips and tears in his army-issued pants, but he couldn’t feel the air against his skin. It was like there was a membrane between him and the rest of the world.

When they got back, he let the medics pick and pull at his skin, trying to gather information on the things Zola had done to him. He told them what he remembered (waking up and passing out and hurting and burning and waking up again and again and again). 

They assigned him to a new squad-- the one with Captain America, whose real name was Peggy Carter and whose fiery commanding aura wasn’t just a front. The other men seemed nice enough, enough that Bucky wouldn’t mind having to spend his time on the front with them. If he was going to die, he might as well do it with some good men at his back. 

The other men were celebrating their newfound freedom in the front of the bar, but Bucky didn’t particularly feel like celebrating. He nursed his beer in the back, with the only company being a couple entranced with each other’s lips. The beer was cold in his hands, the condensation slippery between his fingers. It felt the same way that sweat and blood did.

“Why aren’t you celebrating?” 

Bucky turned, his tired expression fading into a smile. “Hey Stevie.” 

Steve pouted, but there was a familiar love in his gaze that had Bucky melting. “Don’t call me that.” 

“Fight me,” Bucky teased. He took another gulp of his drink.

Steve smiled, leaning into him. His hand trailed up Bucky’s leg, finally resting at the spot between his thigh and his waist. “You made it out, Buck.” 

Bucky closed his eyes. He could feel Steve’s hand at his waist, a familiar but easy weight, and he could feel the condensation dripping down the lines of his palm. There was music playing somewhere, a jazzy thing, with trumpets and drums. He could send his senses out into the great wide world, but he would always come back to this, to Steve’s hand at his waist, holding him steady. 

“I don’t think I made it out,” Bucky said quietly. He knew Steve would hear him. “Not all the way.” 

“You’re here,” Steve said, not understanding. 

Bucky shook his head. He turned to look at Steve, eyes turned down. “But so are you.”

“Maybe you’re just dreaming.” 

“Maybe I’ve lost it for real this time,” Bucky suggested. He laughed under his breath. There was no one there to hear him, not really, he knew that, but he also knew that Steve was smiling, and that was the bigger thing. 

Steve moved his hand to Bucky’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “Either way, I’m with you, pal.” 

“To the end of the line,” Bucky murmured. He found Steve’s hand at his shoulder and tangled their fingers together. Steve still had those cold artist’s fingers, long and wiry, calloused at the knuckles from hours of holding a pencil in the same position. He loved them. 

“Love you,” Steve said, and only Bucky could hear it, but he was the only one who needed to. 

The newly formed Howling Commandos made their way to the front in a series of battles that left more blood on Bucky’s hands than he cared to admit. It was caked under his fingernails, alongside the dirt and shrapnel. It was engraved into his veins and arteries and ligaments. It was a part of him in the same way that Steve was. It was something he wouldn’t ever be able to leave behind him. 

He had watched the life fade from men’s eyes. He had watched their souls leave their bodies in the same way that the wind leaves a tree. He had watched them crumple to the ground as bullets shot straight through their skulls, he had watched Peggy’s shield crack through bullet proof vests like they were paper.

“You did what you had to do,” Steve told him, late at night. They lay in their tent together, while Falsworth was on sentry duty. It was the only time they could talk now, for as long as Bucky wanted the other men to think he was sane. “You didn’t do anything that can’t be forgiven.” 

“I’ve sinned,” Bucky said. It wasn’t a confession, though, it was just a statement. A fact. He had sinned and maybe it was unforgivable, but he couldn’t take it back now. “I’ve killed people. Those people had families. Friends. Maybe they had dogs. I don’t know.” 

Steve was propped up on his elbows, his right hand tracing circles across Bucky’s chest. His fingers were light, just the echo of a touch, but Bucky was shivering anyways. He couldn’t count how many times they had lain like this before, with Bucky on his back and a cigarette between his lips while Steve drew flowers against his skin and kissed his collarbone until it was black and blue. He couldn’t count how many times they had lain like this, with every inch of Bucky loving Steve. 

“You did it for justice. They’re Nazis,” Steve reminded him. He kissed Bucky’s ribcage, his lips cold against Bucky’s skin. A bullet at nearly grazed him there earlier, cutting through his uniform and just barely missing his ribs. “You won’t go to hell for that.” 

“I guess,” Bucky said, a drawl in his words that only came with the haze of Steve being so close. “I love you.” 

“I love you too,” Steve said, staring at him with a gentle kindness in his eyes. There was always an honesty in the irises -- that was the first thing that Bucky had fallen in love with -- and Bucky couldn’t help but drown in them. He could lie there for hours, years, just staring at Steve, counting his breaths and memorizing his jawline. 

He thought he almost had it caught to memory by the time that he fell asleep. When he did, he dreamt of endless blue seas and bullets that swam through the riptides like dolphins.

Peggy was a brilliant fighter, a crack shot with a handgun, and an even more impressive strategist. She drew up battle plans like Steve had drawn up portraits of Bucky (and everything came back to Steve, didn’t it?). 

She was incredible, and Bucky had endless respect for her devil-may-care attitude, but her train plan was insane. Bucky had always liked trains, he liked how fast they were and he liked the choppy sounds they made as they went around a bend, but zip lining onto one was where he drew the line. 

Nevertheless, Peggy Carter was in charge, and Bucky wasn’t going to be the one to undermine her. They weren’t necessarily close, but Peggy had saved him when the rest of the commanders had given up. She had come for him, and he would always owe her that debt. 

So he agreed to the plan. The Howling Commandos positioned themselves at the edge of a mountain, blisters on their heels and frostbite on their lips. 

“Mind the gap,” Falsworth muttered, stuffing the binoculars into his bag. “Go get ‘em, Pegs.” 

Peggy grinned at him, giving him a tight salute. She gripped the zipline tightly, and jumped.

Bucky followed. 

He didn’t expect to live that long, anyways. He thought he was going to die when Steve did. He thought he was going to die at war. He thought he was going to die in the prison camp. He had stared death in the eyes a hundred times already, and he was growing familiar with her face. It wasn’t the fear he felt anymore, it was the adrenaline. 

He followed Peggy and he landed on the train, crawling into a train car. The seconds were passing by the same way that a color flashes by in a kaleidoscope. It was happening and it was not happening and it was happening and there was a gun and a shield and the train was scraping against the tracks and it sounded like screaming. 

It was one of the science fiction bad guys from Azzano, with the blue laser guns and the metal armor and the pounding footsteps like drum beats. It was one of the science fiction bad guys from Azzano, and Bucky should have known better than to think he would ever escape from that hellscape. 

The door of the train car blew out and the wind bit at Bucky’s neck and there were more shots (louder this time, closer to his ear, closer to his heart) and Peggy was tossed to the side and Bucky had to defend her (that was his job and he would not fail now) and then he was falling. 

His arm was almost ripped out of the socket as he made for a rusted railing on the side of the train car. The train was still whipping by too fast for Bucky to get a breath, too loudly for Bucky to catch a thought. 

“Grab my hand!” Peggy was yelling, but her voice was torn apart by the wind, scrambled up and around like a radio signal in a hurricane. 

Bucky reached forward, grabbing desperately at her outstretched hand, he was so close, he was only an inch away-- and then the wind pushed him down again, his weight all too heavy to fly. 

“I’m here,” someone whispered in his ear. It was Steve, and Bucky knew he could trust his Steve to catch him. “I’m here, my love.” 

Bucky let go, and the wind took him into its arms. 

When he woke up, he was in pain. 

He was back on Zola’s table, and part of him wondered if he had ever left. Maybe it had all been a dream-- meeting a British hero named Captain America, finding solace in a dead man’s ghost, falling from a train into the snowy Alps. Maybe he had just been sitting on this same table, the pain still running through his arteries like electricity in a telephone wire. 

They weren’t torturing him anymore, he didn’t think. They were preparing him for something instead. Everything was fuzzy and aching and his arm was a poltergeist of a pain. The doctors were always talking and muttering and there was a constant screaming in the back of his mind.  
He wasn’t sure what he was hearing, but it didn’t matter. It hurt all the same.

He resisted, at first (he had escaped and that had given him hope and he had gotten Steve back and he had learned how to breathe and who was to say he couldn’t do it again). He held stiff while they pulled at his skin, and he wrapped his new metal fist around the throat of a doctor who came to close. 

They shocked him when fought the doctors and lab techs. They doused him in water and found wires to stab his dripping skin when he punched them. They pulled the restraints on his throat tighter when a kick landed on a doctor’s stomach. 

Zola split his wrist with a ruby-encrusted knife when Bucky punched him, and the blood stained his pale skin in the same way that wine stained wedding dresses. He tried to flinch away, writhing in the straps, but he couldn’t move away. He screamed until his throat was hoarse, but Zola cut him open again and again until he had enough stitches to bleed thread.

He didn’t have any words left to describe pain. It was there and it hurt and he didn’t know how to survive it anymore. He begged and cried and he screamed for help, he screamed for God, for his mother, he screamed for Steve Rogers. 

No one came. 

Time passed. 

He was cut open and sewn back shut. His mind was invaded and then closed back up. They walked through his memories and his dreams and his hopes and they trashed everything, shredding every hope he had into scraps of paper. They burnt the ashes and let the flames lick up all the beautiful memories.

At first, he remembered things. He remembered that there had been light, once. It fell against pale skin and painted it something holy. He remembered that he had worshipped that skin. He remembered that there had been an apartment with big windows and a rusted fire escape. He used to smoke on the fire escape, and he would blow the ashes out to the street below. They would stain the sidewalk and no one would think twice about the dirt. 

He remembered that he had been loved. It had been nice. It had been kisses and falling asleep tangled between another person’s lungs. It had been waking up to a warm bed, an arm flung over another person’s waist. It had been fitting into the hollows of another’s skin, it had been finding places to get away together in a world that wanted you apart. 

He remembered that it had been warm. There had been sun and wind and stars. Someone used to keep a hand around his waist, keeping him steady. Someone used to hold his hand when his fingers were cold, and someone used to light his cigarettes when his own hands were too shaky. Someone used to take care of him, he remembered. 

He held onto those memories, at first. He treasured them away in a secret place in his mind, somewhere Zola couldn’t find them. He bottled them up and boxed them into a secret cavern, so deep that sometimes he couldn’t recall them himself. 

But Zola always knew when he was hiding something beautiful. Zola could take any kind thing and make it sharp and cruel. He could take any memory and make it hurt. He took all of those memories, the ones of the light and the sun and the kisses and the love. He didn’t have mercy for the ones Bucky loved most. But that was okay, after a while, because he didn’t remember what he loved most. It must not matter. 

They put him in cryo, where it was dark. It was cold, and there wasn’t any fire being injected into his veins, and salt wasn’t being poured into his cuts. He would take it. They put him in the tube, and he closed his eyes. His muscles relaxed. That was all that there was left to do. 

When he dreamt, there was a man there. He had dirty blonde hair and blue eyes and he looked impossibly small against an endless expanse of darkness. 

“I’m sorry,” the man said. He sounded guilty as sin, something condemned aching in his voice. “I didn’t know this would happen. I didn’t know, I didn’t -- I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay,” he said. He didn’t know what the man was apologizing for. He couldn’t remember a time other than this one. 

“You’re gonna be okay,” the man said, but it sounded like all the assurances were for his own benefit. 

“I don’t know you.” 

“That’s okay,” the man said through the heartbreak etched into his eyes. “I’ll be here when you wake up, love.” 

They took him out of cryo and they shocked him and put a muzzle over his mouth so he couldn’t scream. They took him outside (it was dark and perhaps the sun had burnt out and this hell was all that was left). They told him to kill a ten year old girl. He did it. He did not ask why. 

They put him back in cryo with fresh bruises and cuts littering his body. He felt like he had been painted, some kind of masterpiece of pain. He did not dream that time. When he was woken again, he wondered if maybe they had beaten that ability out of him as well. 

They put him back in cryo and they took him out and they put him back in and every time he went to sleep with more blood on his hands. He didn’t dream. There were new groups of handlers for every mission. They never left him alone. He didn’t know if time was passing. It could have been centuries since he last knew his name. The blue eyed man wasn’t there when he woke up. 

The new handler was named Pierce. He had a square face and glasses and orange-blonde hair. He could kill Pierce five ways with the glasses alone. He did not. They would hurt him if he attacked a handler. (They wouldn’t kill him. They knew that would be a peace.)

All he had to do was kill Captain America. She was a real looker, Pierce said. Could use a gun fairly well. All he had to do was shoot her. He had killed before. He would kill again. Captain America would just be another name on the list, another name he would forget when they wiped him again. He didn’t know how long the list was. 

They gave him a gun and a knife and a grenade. The weapons felt as familiar to his hands as his own fingerprints did. The handlers were letting him on the mission alone for the first time, he was pretty sure. They knew he would come crawling back, with his broken mind being molded to their call. 

He left the Hydra base, quickly finding out where the Captain would be-- S.H.I.E.L.D.’s home base was easy to spot among the hundred other glass buildings in this city. He stalked her from work to the grocery store to home, before finding a quiet perch on the roof of her apartment building. The star on his metal arm seemed to glow in the moonlight. 

“Bucky,” someone whispered. 

He froze. The voice wasn’t familiar (yet it was) and he didn’t know the name (yet he did) and he didn’t want to turn around (but he did). 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner,” a man said. He was squatting behind him, and their eyes met. They were blue, and he knew them. He knew those eyes. They looked like they belonged to sunlight baths and watercolor paintings and back alley kissing and he recognized them with more certainty than he knew anything else. 

“Do you remember me?” the man asked again. 

He stared, analyzing the tilt of the man’s jaw and the slight droop to his smile and the mess of his hair and the slight glow to his skin. “No,” he lied. His voice was hoarse from disuse, and the words scratched at his throat. 

“I’m Steve,” the man said. His voice was like his mother’s best velvet, the one she only ever wore to the Christmas service at church. He didn’t remember velvet and he didn’t remember his mother and this was all wrong but he knew that voice and he knew that voice was something soft and beautiful, he was so irrevocably sure about that. 

“You’re Bucky,” Steve said. “Your name is Bucky.” 

“My name is Bucky,” he said, and the words tasted so good on his tongue. They tasted like coming home. 

Steve broke into a smile, and it was the kind of work of art that Bucky knew he had to memorize. It was the kind of work of art that he would keep ingrained against his heart forever. It was the kind of work of art that Bucky had already spent lifetimes staring at. 

“You can run away,” Steve said quietly. He stood, offering a hand to Bucky.

“I don’t know who you are,” Bucky told him. But something in him was telling him to stand and everything in him trusted this man. 

“Yes you do,” Steve whispered. He took Bucky’s hand, pulling him up. His touch was soft and gentle, and it was nothing like anything Hydra had ever done to him. He squeezed Bucky’s hand, and that felt like coming home too. 

“You know who I am, my love,” Steve said. He pressed his lips to Bucky’s knuckles, lingering against his skin. “You know me.” 

Bucky looked at him, eyes soft against Steve’s kiss. He smiled and said, “I know you.”


End file.
